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Policy Wonk Castigates Net Neutrality
An anonymous reader writes "Tom Giovanetti, president of the Dallas, Texas based public policy think tank Institute for Policy Innovation envisions a chaotic world as a result of Net Neutrality. He says a flood of undiscriminated traffic to and from Youtube, Coldplay, and Victoria's Secret will bring down the Internet, leading to failures of IPTV, VOIP, and emergency services which depend on VOIP. Is he right or wrong?." From the article: "... government should be about fostering a dynamic and risk-taking economy, not preserving the certainty of anyone's business models. Net neutrality regulations would severely restrict broadband providers' right to enter into contracts and to try new business models while protecting the business models of Google and Ebay." Compare this with George Ou's commentary on this subject from yesterday.
I think Tom Giovanetti's reasoning is very justifiable. Often times as humans we are quick to criticize, and very hypocrytical. We should ask ourselves how often we complain about the government regulating this or that and trying to solve problems that don't exist, while at the same time cheer on legislation that would have demanded things such as net neutrality. Now, I'm not saying that there aren't valid reasons for either or both, but it's a rhetorical question that I think we should all be asking ourselves.
Anyway, this is one of the reasons why I'd love to see the government set up a site for everybody to go to, where they can see each of their legislator's votes on issues, as well as a quick comment on the reasoning for voting that way (or longer per the legislator's desire), and put this out there in a very accessible location, and make this a manditory part of the legislative process. The site could be organized in a way such that citizens could easily see the reasoning behind other legislator's votes as well, so that counterpoints are clear to citizens.
This would all help us be better informed and make good decisions, as well as help the government keep itself in check ("I voted no on this legislation because it contains 'xxxxx' add-on legislation that I don't agree with"). Debates would always be there and available to citizens in a way that they can do it at their convenience, and don't have to try and dig up all this information themselves. Essentially, this idea would function a similar purpose as that of a judicial decision opinion (clarifying the decision). We don't need big media to give us all our info anymore. We can get it right from the source. The internet is a very powerful thing. LEVERAGE IT!
Anyway, I know that rant was slightly off topic, but I felt it to be relevant since originally my opinion was leaning towards enacting net neutrality legislation, but I still had my doubts, and this reasoning has made me think that maybe it's just better to wait and see what happens before we get too hasty to legislate, though I still do think that publically funded infrastructure should still be publically owned and unhindered.
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Corporate shill says private companies should be allowed to control the internet. Film at 11.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
First off.. they have been saying one thing or another would "overload the internet" for ages and it has yet to happen.
second. i want to know what his stance on music downloading is given this quote:
"government should be about fostering a dynamic and risk-taking economy, not preserving the certainty of anyone's business models."
if he's against "online piracy" than he is a hyppocrite.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Maybe they should think about taking "Life and Death" stuff off the internet, a back-hoe could take out a large part of the net for a day or two. If emergency reponse people are relying on vonage or skype for critical communications, that is a serrious problem.
Over a day and a half of fury about how the internet is being sold by the u.s. house to the big bucks, my head now aches.
I f.ckin do not believe how you, u.s. people can ALLOW for such debate to even take place, such s.hit rule the agenda, and do not blow your congressmen's senator's ears off about the matter.
The biggest revolution, since the french revolution, the internet, is being handed over to the minority elite.
This is our 'thing'. This is the 'thing' of our times. This is one of the most important thing in our times.
My head really aches, and im weary.
Read radical news here
If an emergency service depends on VoIP, someone needs to be sacked NOW! Dont wait for the service to fail ... failure is certain.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
The internet today is mostly neutral, and people accesing Victoria's Secret haven't brought it down.
The telephone system is neutral, but some telephone numbers are clearly more popular than others. Yet this hasn't brought down the phone system.
The reality is that the engineering of the network (including capacity planning and expansion) is done precisely on the basis of traffic flows. There is also congestion control. The internet is not like the public highway system, where capacity problems take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to solve.
Even if a zillion people did all try to get to the Victoria's Secret web site all at once, that would probably not affect my ability to access my email or read CNN's web site.
VOIP uses UDP. When you get network congestion, you simply get packets dropped and your -oice get- littl- ch-ppy. TCP stacks will send fewer packets per second when packets get dropped.
Ignoramuses keep bringing this issue up as if it's going to KILL THE INTERNET, so we MUST CHANGE INTERNET POLICY. They tried this back in the early 90's when IBM was running the T-1 Internet backbone through some subsidiary. What didn't work back then still won't work today. For an arbitrary packet on the Internet, you cannot tell in which direction the value is flowing; thus you cannot figure out who to charge.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
This ignores the fact that people and companies adapt. I'm sure the 911 service won't just hope things don't fail; for example, I cluster the servers that handle 911 dialing on our campus because I don't "hope they won't fail." It's like in the 70s when people thought we'd be out of gas by 1996. They forgot to consider that people make adjustments as the world around them changes. We have more gas now than ever. Same with bandwidth.
The State should not get involved.
The unintended consequences of any act upon a complex system are far greater than the intended consequence - if the intended consequence even occurs at all.
Morevoer, State intervention upon one issue opens the doors to State intervention on many issues.
Do we really think, overall, that the sum of State intervention will be positive or negative?
Given past performance, suspectibility to lobbying, short-sighted political behaviour, "it's for the children", simple incompetence and failure to understand the issues, I'd be far happier with zero State intevention.
Suchs laws would severely impact the contracts broadband companies can enter into.
That's the entire point.
They've been handed full or near monopolies on data communications, and with monopoly comes restriction.
Because they already have, already are, and will continue to screw over the consumer.
Heck, even companies that do not have monopolies have huge restrictions on screwing over their customers when it comes to conflicts of interest. For example; some investment banker isn't allowed to tell you how great company X is, if a different unit of his bank happens to be seriving company X's IPO. That's really just plain common sense.
Net non-neutrality is very simple, basic, econ 101 vertical monopoly. Nothing at all suspect about wanting to curb it. Yes, it happens to benefit other companies. In fact, making sur the vertical playing ground is even benefits the entire economy, and not just broadband companies rights to enter into contracts.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Basically, the premise of the tiered system is that companies like your tube, google, etc don't pay for all the bandwidth they consume. NPR's Market Place had a horrible story on last night claiming that with out extra cash from these large web sites, they can't expand bandwidth.
It's the dumbest argument ever. 1) Companies that large connect directly to top tier providers. These companies are paying hundreds of thousandsands of dollars to the top 10 internet back bone providers for fat pipes into the internet. 2) We have tons of dark fiber still running across the US. Companies liek Qwest invested millions upon millions of dollars in infrastructure for customers who still don't exist.
We don't have a bandwidth problem. We have a problem with a congress that doesn't understand infrastructure.
BTW: Here's the list of house member who voted NO the ammendment:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2006/roll239.xml
This "think tank" was founded by Republican Dick Armey in 1987.
As usual, you just need to follow the money in these matters and this is very revealing. The last year that records were kept regarding Dick Armey's contributions you'll see that his top contributor was Allegiance Telecom. Other notables in the "Dick Armey" include National Cable & Telecommunications Assn, Verizon, BellSouth and SBC. It's all here at open secrets.
Politicians remain lapdogs to their masters even after leaving the Hill
We need to ask ourselves if this is a tragedy of the commons or a case where uniform access decreases costs or provides more public-goods. I don't know which it really is.
The tragedy of the commons is what happens when a resource is provided that lacks a proper mariginal cost for increased use. The classic example is private property versus unrstricted access to public grazing land. By charging a small price for admission per sheep to the land or by making it private, the incentive to overgraze it is removed and the total amount of meat sustainbly raise actually is higher. In this case if it's case where there is simply not enough baqndwith for everyone to do voip, and I don't pay any extra to do VOIP, then it's going to be over grazed and everyone gets a crappy connection. On the otherhand if the connection cost already is sufficient to expand the network to handle all the users that want voip or if we can prevent this from becomeing a power law network with critical links then it may be that the more users the better some sort of p2p works.
Thus another way of looking is this is that the thing we need to fear is too few corporation controlliing the internet and resulting in bottlenecks on backbones. In the long run to get high bandwidth we will need p2p that does not traverse a central backbone.
Assuming that the p2p scaling effect will not be sufficient and the tragedy of the commons wil happen then the way out is to have a pricing schedule. We can put that schedule on the users or on the content providers. the latter is what the backbone owners want since it means no net neutrality and control. The former would be better but I can imagine the cheap ass slashdotters used to paying a tiny sum for all-they-can eat internet won't like it.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Yeah, while that's a great ideal, it's not the reality right now. Personally, I have two choices for broadband interent: Comcast cable, or SBC DSL. A duopoly hardly is a good environment for fostering consumer choices. While capitalism is great and all, it breaks down when there are monopolies (or duopolies; they don't really allows for much more competition than monopolies). As it does not make sense for multiple companies to hang wires all around the country, a monopoly is assured. In order to protect other services which might use the wires of that monopoly (wires which were, by the way, laid partially with public money) from the monopolies' own interests (i.e., other VoIP providers from the monopolies' own VoIP service), regulation is neccessary.
Put more simply, this has nothing to do with reliability. This is about a few companies controlling the internet.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
Yes, if we were in a situation where individual customers could vote with their feet on net neutrality this anslysis would have a point. There would be less government regulation and the market could sort out whether people value net neutrality.
However, there is little to no effective competition in the internet access market. Sure there is a bit of competition between the cable and phone companies and electric companies always claim to be just about to deploy broadband over powerlines but these providers control the lines and can make life very difficult for any other DSL providers. Besides even if your broadband provider believes in net neutrality it isn't clear you don't still suffer from privleges granted by an upstream carrier. In short their is no easy way for competition to exercisce its judgement that net neutrality is worth paying for (and with enough money surely people could expand their pipes).
I mean just imagine if the local phone company announced it was going to charge you double if you called any buisness that didn't join its prefered buisness program (i.e. paid it money). This would be extortion and phone regulations rightly prohibit it because otherwise phone companies could use their monopoly position to exact almost arbitrarily high profits.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Let me see if I'm understanding this.
If there is enough bandwidth then everyone's traffic will get through regardless of Net Neutrality. If there is congestion though, without Net Neutrality only traffic from sites that paid the extortion fee will get through.
Does this not lead to a situation where it is ideal for an ISP to maintain a certain level of congestion at all times in order to ensure that there exists a reason to pay the extortion fee?
One the other hand with Net Neutrality in place it's in the ISP's best interest to maintain an adequate level of bandwidth to make sure everyone's traffic gets through.
Why the hell would any mission critical or emergency service be using the Internet as a medium for transport? These services should be on their own redundant private networks.
People have been predicting the death of the Internet for years. First 56k modems were going to do it, then the glut of DSL and cable subscribers. Now it's going to be all the fibre to premises customers and Google. After that it will probably be WiMAX because now we're going to have kilometers of wireless coverage that anyone can jump on. These people seem to forget that bandwidth is a two-way street. You might have 5Mbps down, and all your neighbors, but the hosted server most likely has a bandwidth lock at 1Gbps or so... that's your limiting factor, not how much bandwidth you can pull down.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Check this segment FTFA:
Suddenly, the TV image goes pixilated, and then dark. The phone call drops. You hear yelling from your teenagers' rooms. But that's not all.
Across town, police on the beat suddenly can't reach headquarters on their radios. In an ambulance, the EMTs are trying to call in vital signs for a patient they are transporting to the hospital, but they can't get through.
Is it an alien invasion? A convergence of planets or some other astral phenomenon? No, it's a convergence of a different sort. Turns out that tonight is also the night of the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, as well as the night Coldplay releases its latest song online. And YouTube has just released embarrassing video of a major Hollywood star having a ``wardrobe malfunction.''
My question is: how does prioritizing help. If a neutral net can't handle all of this at once, how could one claim a tiered Internet CAN.
And if it's not at all about being able to handle all at once (but about blackmailing service providers), but prioritizing one over the other, which of these should fail?
The quick answer is that VOIP and police stations should have high priority and the rest can go to hell. But is this (to quote the article again) "the converged, always-on, interconnected world we've all been dreaming of".
Would you let some corporate or government entity to anonymously decide which stuff is important and which is less important?
Is the stuff from those who pay more, more important?
Is Coca Cola's site more important than Pepsi's site? Is Yahoo more important than Google?
Plenty of questions, for which the answers will change with every shift of power, as people "on top" work on doing what's "best for us", since we're apparently told we don't know it ourselves.
Trusting the big telcos and cable companies to act in the best interests of their customers is like hiring a python as a babysitter. They're going to act in the best interest of the bottom line. If the market is savvy enough to make acting in the interest of customers a competitive factor, then they'll do it. If it's not, then they'll screw their customers to make more money and their customers will just bitch and moan, but won't leave.
A very real fear is that a telco says "this pipe is reserved for general internet traffic" and never increases the size of that pipe. As time goes on, they continue to expand capacity, but all new capacity is reserved for the pay-for-play lanes. The original pipe stays its original size for years, getting more and more congested until any company that wants to reach this telco's customers with any kind of speed or surety needs to pay the telco for access to the pay-for-play lanes. That's an unregulated net where filtering and prioritizing has gone awry.
On an overregulated network, where absolute neutrality is enforced, you have the doomsday scenario where World Cup streaming takes down the Internet.
A middleground I think works is that you enforce a ratio of neutral pipe width to free prioritized pipe width (for ensuring that certain services can maintain a certain minimum level of quality) to pay-for-play prioritized pipe width (where a QOS is guaranteed to anyone willing to pay the premium). As capacity grows, all of those pipes grow at a proportional rate. So if BellSouth/AT&T lays new fiber that triples bandwidth across their backbone, the neutral pipe width triples, the free prioritized pipe width triples, and the pay-for-play pipe width triples.
It's figuring out what's a fair ratio and a workable way of monitoring it that's the trick.
Start a happiness pandemic
The author is not an independent researcher. He is a paid shill for an-industry funded think tank founded by one of the more aggressively pro-corporate members of the House GOP leadership.
Let's not forget that "net neutrality" is the STATUS QUO. The telcoms want to change the system to take net neutrality AWAY. Recognize this, and the author's "straw man" argument collapses. Shame on the Mercury News for printing this corporate PR garbage on its op-ed pages.
Why is it called COMMON sense when so few people have it?
Hey! Thats Verisons staff schedule
24 minutes per hour
7 hours per day
52 days per year
Unfortunately, due to consolidation, mergers, rabid anti-spam measures, and hard-line corporate push towards 'consumerism' on virtually any kind of internet connection- that's just not true anymore.
A few years ago, it used to be that Apple would bring Akamai to its knees every time they had a big announcement, and anyone that used Akamai (which was a large number of popular sites) would suffer; a million mac users would be trying to load up the webcast or hitting "refresh" a thousand times on store.apple.com or www.apple.com.
Google is another example. Google is so ingrained in people's brains that I watch fellow -professional- sysadmins ping "www.google.com" as a test of whether a machine has DNS and outgoing connectivity. People hardly bookmark things anymore; they just "google it" and sift through the first 6 hits or so to find what they were looking for.
Here's my point: pick any one of the big giants in the internet world today. Now picture they're gone- wiped off the map by a disgruntled employee, a natural disaster, or more likely these days- a corporate scandal (imagine what would happen if Google was the next Enron. If you think that's impossible, look at the Google CFO's background.) Now think about how much that would hurt the web. We've made progress in some areas of the Internet (DNS- you have lots of choices for registrars, though GoDaddy has become the largest by far, and now represents a similar risk), but lost massively in others.
I have ONE choice in internet service provides in my town. I live 20 miles from Boston, but because of "Gentlemen's agreements" that are pervasive in the telco industry, I can't get DSL because Comcast is in our town. 10 years ago I could pick from a dozen dialup ISPs, national, regional, and local- same for ISDN. Now I have ONE choice, and I live in one of the more wealthy and technologically advanced states in the union, and I'm not permitted by my ToS to run a webserver, email server, "discussion board", or "Internet relay chat server". I believe I'm not even allowed to run a VPN server. My ToS clearly states that I am a "consumer" of information services. That's progress?
Please help metamoderate.
- Armstrong Foundation
- Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
- Gordon and Mary Cain Foundation
- Carthage Foundation
- Jaquelin Hume Foundation
- Earhart Foundation
- JM Foundation
- F.M. Kirby Foundation
- Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation
- Sarah Scaife Foundation
- John M. Olin Foundation
- Roe Foundation
Unfortunately for their donor "privacy", 503(c) organizations have to file lists of their donors every year. Assume that the telcos will show up in the next filing statement... and that the "policy wonk" is a corporate shill who'd be bloviating in favor of Net Neutrality if Google had paid IPI first. Or NAMBLA if that pedophile organization had paid IPI off to generate "neutral" opinions.Here's another IPI opinion:
Tech Public Policy stuff
I'll give you another reason not to trust the invisible hand to write QoS rulesets: because the rulesets are too opaque. ISP's will be constantly playing with complicated QoS rulesets, naturally *without* notifying customers. When I'm shopping around for an ISP, do you honestly think they'll volunteer the fact that they cripple Vonage to promote their own service? No way. The sheer complexity and unavailability of information from ISPs will make it difficult or impossible for consumers to really know what they're getting, and thus for corrective market forces to work.
Telcos want to compete with cablecos and everyone else in the world in delivering "IPTV". They want to leverage their oligopoly advantage in controlling the backbones to compete with what would otherwise be a level playing field.
Porn always forecasts the trend in comms/entertainment tech markets. Amateur porn and tiny little producers/distributors are the majority of porn consumed. TV of all genres will go the same way, now that the Internet has hit critical mass of high bandwidth consumers. Telcos can't compete with such a diverse array of content competitors on a level playing field, so of course they're working to fragment and unlevel the field.
Giovanetti of course knows this. His analysis doesn't come from any ignorance but the willful kind. The principles are obvious, the break with the decades-old, unprecedentedly successful "neutral Internet" too blatant to miss. He's shilling for corporations who benefit for his thinktank's "less regulation" ideology. As usual, deregulation promotion masks corporate anarchy in the name of "freedom". Freedom for corporations to exploit us without government protection.
--
make install -not war
It's worth noting that capitalism actually creates monopolies. Because you mix free competition and strong law, you allow companies to manipulate legal bodies in order to create law that is to their advantage.
Please don't tar libertarianism with the same brush as capitialism. Under libertarianism, there would be fewer laws that could be used to create monopolies or duopolies. This would mean that you've probably end up with a large number of smaller businesses, with few reaching into multiple areas.
The problem with the Net Neutrality issue currently is not that we need a law in order to protect the internet from these multi-tiered systems (because as it is, if Bell try anything, they're unlikely to succeed), but that we need a law to protect from a law artifically empowering these multi-tier systems.
In short, libertarianism would mean that there would be no political merchants (such as senators) for the businesses to buy, because the effect of law would be so small. The internet would continue the way it always has done, because a) you probably wouldn't get large, powerful monopolising businesses like Bell to cause these issues, b) creating an "empowerment law" like Bell need would be impossible and c) smaller businesses with mean more competition, and enough newcomers to ensure that no companies take "fat cat" payola like the multi-tier system.
Libertarianism is very different to capitalism. If we want to start moving there the first thing we have to do is to make sure that we're very careful about the order of removal of the laws. It's important to make sure that large businesses don't lure us into only taking the deregulaion stance on areas where it benefits them. If we run a system that is fair and democratic, then our first mission is to make sure that the system stays fair and democratic at all points in the move towards libertarianism.
People who take the "He's more Libertarian! I like it!" policy are being seduced by large businesses (the grand parents is a case in point). It's better, from a liberty point of view, to ensure that Net Neutrality is legislated on. Otherwise we risk having a massively capitalist state because we've selectively deregulated (deregulation is needed to be equal in all areas, or massive problems are generated). In libertarianism, the issue of Net Neutrality wouldn't get far.
Eric Cantor is my representative in the House, and he voted "No" to the "net neutrality" amendment. Here is the text of my letter to him:
June 8, 2006
The Honorable Eric Cantor
U.S. House of Representatives
329 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515-4607
Dear Congressman Cantor:
As your constituent, I am very concerned about the efforts of the telephone and cable companies to fundamentally alter the way the Internet works, and urge you to do all you can to protect the Internet as we know it and to stand up for the principle of "net neutrality."
It seems that you do not agree with this sentiment, since you help to defeat the "Markey of Massachusetts Amendment" (HR 5252). My only conclusion must be that you are poorly informed about the issue, and have allowed the incumbent telephone and cable companies to unduly influence you. Make no mistake - this is one of the most important issues of our time, and the plans of these communication companies will destroy our public infrastructure. I work in the field of Information Technology, and I have a clear understanding of both sides of the issue. Frankly, you have supported the wrong side.
I am a conservative person, and am always opposed to intrusive government regulation, especially at the national level. Unfortunately, the ISP industry does not respond well to market pressures, since most services exist as monopolies or near-monopolies, and were supported as monopolies by federal laws for many years. The market will not be able to keep the damage in check. The Internet will fundamentally change, and very much for the worse.
This is not about Google, Amazon and eBay wanting a "free ride". I understand why they support network neutrality regulation, but they are the few supporters with the deep pockets to make their opinion heard. The real losers will be the small businesses and individual citizens. I'm sure you have heard about Web Loggers or "bloggers" on the Internet. They are the freedom-minded individuals that create news and opinion websites on small budgets, and report on current issues. It was the bloggers that first revealed that the National Guard documents about President Bush, reported on 60 Minutes, were actually a hoax. Without net neutrality, these small voices will be silenced. Most are small, unfunded writers with opinions, started websites out of their own pockets. ISPs will now be allowed to silence these small voices.
My wife is very fond of researching products before she purchases them. She will go to forum sites and discussion boards on the Internet, where she can read the experiences and opinions of other people. When access to content can be strictly controlled by the big ISPs, manufacturers will be able to pay to have these websites effectively blocked, or throttled to such a degree that they are effectively useless.
The Internet is NOT television, Representative Cantor, and it should not be run like television, but the ISPs will now be given the ability to do that. I have several hundred channels of content available on my television today, and there is nothing to watch. Sure, there are be a few independent voices out there, but they are of such poor quality and so full of static that they are be unwatchable. So what do I do? I just turn it off. It appears that this will happen to the Internet, too. Do you want everyone so frustrated with the Internet that they will just turn it off?
The Internet produced one of the greatest communication revolutions of our time. It connects people with people. Not everyone can afford to produce a slick television show or advertisement and pay for air time, but anyone can put up a web site and have their message available to the world. No more. Since the big 5 media companies will want all the bandwidth they can buy to push our their content, and Google, Amazon, and eBay paying the ISPs for some of the extra left, all the small voice will be drowned out.
Please reconsider your stance. You may be given a chance to make the right decision next time.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
That's progress?
No.
That's capitalism.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
what the hell does it take to get Americans angry and up in arms??
The President getting a blow-job from a chubby intern?
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
There are some justifications for guaranteed bandwidth. For example, one could see a portion of the net being split off for VOIP use only and it would make sense to protect that from spikes in pron DLing or whatever. So yes, I can see some arguments for protected bandwidth. But this whole debate is smoke screen for a monopoly grab and deregulation. Net Neutrality should be the norm and exceptions carved out of that on a case by case basis where justified. NOT the other way around.
The loss of Net Neutrality goes way beyond that and strips every protection against monopoly on the internet. FACT: with the loss of Net Neutrality, anyone who doesn't have a contract with a Telco assuring them a chunk of bandwidth (i.e. everyone except the largest companies) no longer has any right to be on the internet and can be completly shut down. Blocking traffic is completly at the discretion of Telcos now.
What the loss of Net Neutrality does is to completely deregulate the internet and allow Telcos to shut down any site they choose. That's no exaggeration. Now, there are no consumer protections and no guidelines on what's fair and what's not in regards to filtering.
Anyone who thinks the free market is going to ensure fair competition is a real dunce. History shows the natural outcome of a completely unfettered market is an anti-competitive monopoly. That's why we had to regulate to prevent monopolies for pete's sake!
To make matters worse, other deregulation a while ago means Telco monopolies are no longer required to offer their lines service to small ISP. In other words they don't even have to share their government sanctioned monopoly on the last mile anymore. So, there goes the competitive market as small ISP are gradually squeezed out over the coming years.
This is going to lead to aggressive and highly anti-competitive Telcos running turf wars on an unfettered and unethical internet. Fair competition will vanish quickly. If for example a rival company (insert mega-corp of choice) wants to pay more to shut down your bandwidth than you can pay to buy your bandwidth, that's perfectly legal now. If Oracle for example had wanted to pay to buy People Soft's internet bandwidth to depress their stock price and ease the takeover, perfectly legal now. If MS wans to pay confidentially to hobble Linux servers or companies using them, again, perfectly legal now.
The loss of Net Neutrality means there is now no regulation and turns the internet and Telcos into monopolies capable of extorting protection money, and calling that protection: perfectly legal fees.
I really can't believe the lack of awareness and apathy on this issue from supposedly tech savvy people.
That's a comple non-sequiter and really ignorant or a deliberate lie.
9-11 was due to individual sites lacking the SERVER capacity to hand traffic, causing server crashes and such. The fiber backbone and the last mile had PLENTY of bandwidth to carry the traffic. So the argument that the net needs toll lanes to handle capcity, that is just complete and utter bullshit.
The telcos just want the power to throttle traffic at their whim to create a new revenue model which is basically bandwidth protection and extortion. Toll booths are the perfect analogy.
And no, there is NO market competition becasue all packets going over the internet must pass through each company network at some point, at which point it can be killed, throttled, whatever.
So each packet is actually going through multiple monopolies that are now able to charge fees from a position of monopoly. NOT going across multiple networks that are competing to lower fees. BIG DIFFERENCE.